A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
Warm wet snow fell twice over the last week of 2018, coating trees, shrubs and anything else standing outside with a sticky layer of snow that turned the trails at the Cloquet Forestry Center into a winter wonderland.
Ethan Doty, 13, works hard to widen the end of the driveway last Friday while his brother and dad work to finish up clearing away the rest of the snow at their Carlton Avenue home in Cloquet.
It's been feast or famine for snow in the Northland this season, but things are nearly normal now after two different snow events dumped close to 15 inches of snow since Dec. 26.
"From Thanksgiving to Christmas we had only a couple inches of snow, so it was very dry," said Steve Gohde, observing program leader for the National Weather Service in Duluth. "We had started departing from normal - normal is 35.1 inches, and we've got 33.5 inches now - but we were pretty flatline until that injection of about 20 inches of snow (between the storm Dec. 26-28 and the New Year's Eve snowfall)."
Gohde said the folks at the Cloquet Forestry Center measured 9.6 inches of snow on Dec. 28, but didn't have measurements for the Dec. 31 snowfall. Moose Lake reported 10 inches after the Dec. 26-28 storm and another 4 inches on Dec. 31, while weather spotters in Wrenshall reported 10.9 and 3.7 inches and east of Wright reported 10.6 and 3.5 inches. In Duluth the totals were 13.1 inches and 4.3 inches for the two snow events.
The holiday snow brought lots of kids and parents out for winter fun, and the sliding hills at Cloquet's Pinehurst Park and Churchill School were packed Friday. The deep snow was not ideal for sliding, but the deep freeze over New Year's Eve and New Year's Day likely improved conditions for avid sledders. Of course, the subzero temperatures also deterred most kids and their parents from playing outside for a day or two.
Les Peterson, the city street and parks maintenance supervisor (see story on Page 9) said city crews worked to clear the hockey- and skating rinks and skating ribbon quickly over the holidays. Peterson estimated Cloquet got closer to 12 inches of snow from the first storm and another 4 inches or so on Monday.
"Because we have a fairly good-sized staff now, we have staff members who go and do sidewalks and skating rinks while others are still clearing the roads," he said, explaining that the city will usually try to get the sidewalk routes cleared first, but over the holidays they made the rinks a slightly higher priority.
"If kids are in school we try to get to the sidewalks that the city clears, which aren't exactly the same as the 'Safe Routes to School' routes, but they're pretty close," he added. "That way the little guys can get to school without getting run over."
City crews were still playing catch-up in terms of excess snow removal on Jan. 2, as the city's giant SnoGo snowblower and plow trucks were busy filling up dump trucks with snow piled high on roadsides and in parking lot corners after the Dec. 31 snowfall.
Most area elementary and secondary students went back to school Wednesday, Jan. 2.
